Writer, editor, researcher

Weekend jam: Kare by P-Unit from Nairobi

Alright, get over the corny name. P-Unit has come out with one of the catchiest songs of the summer, as far as I’m concerned. Makes me want to pour up some Famous and tonic and peep the scene from a corner in Bacchus.

Apparently one of the singers is actually a doctor. He says so in the song: “mimi ni daktari.” (That he is a doctor in real life is completely unconfirmed, but I’m told this is reported somewhere.) You will notice that all the words rhyme with kare, which may be a colloquial way of pronouncing kali, which in standard Swahili means something along the lines of “harsh,” but in slang maybe means something along the lines of “hot.” As in, “Ooh, that’s hot.”

There are a lot of maybes in the attempted translation above because my sources are a little hazy on the exact meaning (I don’t speak Kiswahili, let alone Sheng). So if you’ve got a better idea, please let me know.

I’ve been criticized by some Kenyans (OK, one Kenyan) for blogging music that has already made the rounds on the Kenyan webosphere. Well, whatever… If it you don’t like me giving East Africa its propers, I can always move onto another region next week.

Until then, I’ll be bumpin’ Kare out of my personal listening device (no brand names will get shout outs here).

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Mandela on media

"Although I read a variety of newspapers from around the country, newspapers are only a poor shadow of reality; their information is important to a freedom fighter not because it reveals the truth, but because it discloses the biases and perceptions of both those who produce the paper and those who read it." - Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom.